The majority of BioMed Central journals increased their Impact Factors in the latest Journal Citation Report. 21 journals also received Impact Factors for the first time, bringing the total number of journals with Impact Factors to 101.

Strong performances by society-affiliated titles emphasized the potential for open access to increase the visibility and impact of society journals.

For further information and a full list of the new Impact Factors, see the blog post.

GigaScience, an innovative new journal being launched by BioMed Central and BGI, is now accepting submissions. GigaScience, edited by Dr Laurie Goodman, publishes research relating to biological ‘big-data’ studies, whilst promoting an integrated database to enable rapid release and permanency of data and providing a forum for dealing with the difficulties of handling such large-scale data.

In a recent study published in Genome Medicine, David Lanfear and colleagues show that the site of recruitment is an important factor in determining whether patients are willing to participate in genetic research.

Many studies have tried to find the regions of the genome that are associated with breast cancer risk, yet so far only a small proportion of heritability can be explained. A research article in the latest issue of Genome Medicine identifies two genomic regions linked to breast cancer risk by incorporating information on diet and hormone exposure.

BMC Proceedings has published the abstracts from the International Conference on Prevention & Infection Control (ICPIC 2011). Geneva, Switzerland. 29 June – 2 July 2011.

Critical Care has published the meeting abstracts from the Sixth International Symposium on Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine for Latin America. S¿o Paulo, Brazil. 22-25 June 2011.

BMC Bioinformatics has published the proceedings from ECCB 2010 Workshop: Annotation interpretation and management of mutations (AIMM). Ghent, Belgium. 26 September 2010.

•A method commonly used to infer functional connectivity in neural circuits, Granger causality, has been put to the test on the well-defined crab pyloric network by Eve Marder and colleagues in a paper in Neural Systems and Circuits. Commenting in BMC Biology, Charles Stevens and Shyam Srinivasan posit that the need for nervous systems to be robust and fault tolerant makes it inevitable that inferential techniques of this kind will be error-prone.

•Centrosome repositioning occurs in cytolytic cells of the innate immune system, just as it does in those of the adaptive system, focusing the release of cytotoxic granules at the site of contact with the target cell.

Pediatric vasculitis late-therapy morbidity outcomesPediatric Rheumatology 2011, 9:12 Although primary systemic vasculitis is rare in pediatric patients, assessment of the long-term outcomes following treatment from a young age into adulthood shows an increased late morbidity and infection-complication rate.